Ben Smith recounts the public relations moves the Obama White House used in an unsuccessful attempt to kill Jodi Kantor’s not-particularly damaging book The Obamas:
One can argue that the once-dominant writing exercise known as the book — a collection of words roughly 4,000 tweets long — is increasingly difficult for the modern media to digest.
But a skillful promotional campaign can help such a weighty work get traction even in today’s blink-and-you-miss-it news cycle. The White House recently showed how it’s done; the problem is, the Obama administration had hoped to bury this book, not praise it.
[. . .]
But now that the dust has settled and the shooting war between Kantor and the White House has waned, it’s clear that the decision to go to DEFCON 3 may well have been a tactical goof for the White House, which wound up largely validating — in caricature — the very themes of the book that it wanted to discredit: Michelle Obama’s continuing adjustment to her role as first lady and the reactive and sometimes hair-trigger political operation around her.
The White House air war also may have been good for sales: Kantor’s title remains on the best seller lists. The book, which is deeply reported and nuanced, also has been well-reviewed.
“What was so surreal was watching what looked like a classic political attack play out — except that some of it was directed at me,” Kantor, a reporter for The New York Times, said in an interview. “I got a lot of support from other reporters who felt they had been attacked or treated harshly by this White House. It’s not like this came out of nowhere.”
